Praying to the God of Grace

A rough draft of the volume I’m working on for the Everyday Bible Study series. This one is on Ephesians and Colossians. No questions from Becky Castle Miller yet, as I have not sent this one to her yet.

Here’s the rough draft of Ephesians 1:15-23

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, ¹⁶ I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. ¹⁷ I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. ¹⁸ I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, ^19a and his incomparably great power for us who believe.

^19b That power is the same as the mighty strength ²⁰ he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, ²¹ far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. ²² And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, ²³ which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

         Some people are known in their prayers. In talking about her grandfather, Willa Cather’s wonderful character, Ántonia, said this about her grandfather’s prayers on Christmas morning: “Grandfather's prayers were often very interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and his views about things.” Her grandfather loved the Lord and the Bible. On that Christmas morning “He read the chapters from Saint Matthew about the birth of Christ, and as we listened, it all seemed like something that had happened lately, and near at hand. … He gave thanks for our food and comfort, and he prayed for the poor and destitute and great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us” (Cather, My Ántonia, 67). Prayers can be revealing.

For me it is a pity I hear so many critical comments about the apostle Paul, as if he were some nasty missionary administrator commandeering everyone here and there. A man with a hard heart can’t pray like the apostle Paul. Prayers reveal hearts.

So today I want to dip into four features of Paul’s thanksgiving, four features that can instruct us in our praying habits. Before we turn there, the operative words in this prayer – and Paul wound it up for one whole verse before he got to the words – are “I have not stopped giving thanks” or “I don’t stop thanking” (1:16; NIV and Second Testament). The Greek word we translate with thanks is eucharisteō, a word built on two words – the first good (eu) and the second grace, or gracing (charis). That combination of terms makes me ponder how prayer is connected to grace. Paul describes God releasing a ball in a pinball machine of thanks. God shows grace to Paul, Paul to the Ephesians, the Ephesians to Paul, and Paul back to God in good-gracing (thanking) God for the pinging joys of grace. Now to four ideas about prayer.

Personal

         In prayer Paul goes personable. In verses fifteen to nineteen I circled fifteen personal pronouns (I, my, you, your, and one “us”). Paul makes prayer for the Ephesians a personal connection. He prays out of his knowing of them: “ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people” (1:15). The First Nations  amplifies “Lord Jesus” into “Creator Sets Free (Jesus).” They’ve tapped on an important but neglected key in the meaning of Lord: this Lord truly sets people free. Paul knows their faith journeys into this freedom. He’s not like the priest with a written liturgical prayer in front of him in which he has scratched in a caret (^), above which he pens in the name of the person he’s praying for. Paul knows these folks so well his prayers are tailored to them and to them alone. They were known for loving one another, though Revelation will reveal to us this very church lost its love (Revelation 2:4).

Before Kris and I eat our evening meal we not only give thanks to God for our food but we pray for our family and for others who have expressed needs to us or who have asked us to pray for them: John, Mike, Nancy, Mary, Taylor, Becky. Sometimes we can’t remember names, but God knows about whom we are praying when we say “and others.” Names make prayer personal and the pray-er personable as naming names transcends the pious-sounding “bless our families and friends.” When we at times tell someone we have been praying for them, they often express a warm affection of thanks. The Ephesians, or whoever hears this letter read, will have pushed the button in the pinball machine to return the grace of thanksgiving back to Paul.

Mediated

         Prayer for Paul is profoundly priestly because prayer mediates. Paul takes the Ephesians before God in thanking God for them, but he informs the Ephesians he’s saying good things about them to God. Even if Paul’s “I have not stopped thanking” has no object (God), the object in all of Paul’s thanksgivings is God (cf. Romans 1:8; 1 Corinthians 1:4; Philippians 1:3; Colossians 1:3; 1 Thessalonians 1:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:3; 1 Timothy 1:12; 2 Timothy 1:3; Philemon 4).

Paul’s thanksgivings morph into petitions. He thanks, he then remembers, and then he asks (Ephesians 1:16-17). One of the great Protestant doctrines is the priesthood of all believers, that is, the direct, unmediated, and full access to God for every believer in Christ. Yet, even here our priestly access to God is, like all graces, only available “in Christ.” The freshness of this idea does not counter Israel’s non-accessibility to God or of God’s inaccessibility to only priests. Rather, the priesthood of Christ and our being in Christ makes us all priests (as Peter teaches at 1 Peter 2:5, 9). Which means we are given the ministry of mediating between God and humans, and humans and God – and praying is the primary act of mediation. We are so used to this privilege we can become numb to the glories of it: we are privileged in Christ to take others into the presence of God by praying for them. It’s a bold move to stand in God’s presence to take up an issue about someone else, and ask God to do something for them.

Abstract

         Paul’s prayers requests can sound abstract in what he asks for. Mark Roberts, after many years as a pastor, admits “Most of us don’t pray like this” because “We tend to pray for immediate needs” (Roberts, Ephesians, 51). Paul petitions the “glorious Father” to give to them “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation” (1:17). The answer to that rather abstract prayer request leads to the Ephesians knowing God better. In my life learning to know God better correlates with knowing that God reveals himself in Jesus Christ, looking for God in Bible reading, listening to God in prayer, learning about God as God works among God’s people, and exulting in the glory of God in the grandeur of creation. If it were all reduced to reading the Bible Paul would have said that. Instead, he began with “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation.” Paul expects the Spirit to reveal to us the wisdom of God. Again, Mark Roberts: “knowing God, therefore, isn't something fixed and static, some list of facts that we master and then move on to other things. Rather, it is a lifelong growing in our understanding and experience of God” and “there is always more to be known” (Roberts, Ephesians, 55-56).

Knowing God is fleshed out in these words: “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (1:17-18). I want to reduce these abstractions to their basic senses. First, Paul prays for them to know God, which can only happen through the Holy Spirit who provides wisdom and revelation. Second, Paul prays they will become absorbed in the Christian Story’s hope, which means living now in the confidence that God will grant them the grand inheritance in the kingdom. Remember, the inheritance Paul has in mind is to be part of the people of God, in the plan of God, for the future of God.  Third, Paul prays they will experience the power of God in their life. Thus Paul prays for: Know God. Embrace the Christian hope. Experience God’s power. I now finish what Mark Roberts wrote above: “Our problem isn’t that we pray for too many tiny needs; it’s that we don't pray for enough big ones” (Roberts, Ephesians, 51).

People who care about others and pray for others would be wise to compare their prayer requests to Paul’s, not to criticize their prayers. No, if we ponder our prayers enough we can often see how connected they are to wanting others to know God, wanting others to live out the Christian hope, and wanting others to experience God’s power. Paul’s terms, I have said, are abstract. Perhaps it would be better to say they are wide and deep terms for what humans most want out of this life. They are big enough to catch most of our requests for others.

Sidetracked

         Paul’s theology and style, as we wrote in the previous passage, are an acquired taste. In the middle of verse nineteen Paul is unleashed, and he wanders from his prayer request to an extrapolation of what he means by the power of God. It’s a sidebar of a sidetracked apostle, who has fallen in love with the God whose power he has experienced over and over.  In a word, the abundant “power” (dunamis) available to believers (1:19a) is the “energy” (energeia) of God that God “energized” (energeō) in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (1:19b-20; Second Testament). What a claim! Believers have access to resurrection and ascension energies and powers.

Sidebar: The Importance of the Ascension

“Thus in Jesus’ ascension God has (1) reconciled the world to himself, (2) restored the immortal human glory of his image-bearing children, (3) empowered those eschatologically ‘seated in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus’ (Eph 2:6 NIV) with the life of his Spirit, and (4) guaranteed the consummation of heaven and earth in union with God.”

Cherith Fee Nordling, Becky Castle Miller, “Ascension,” in The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, 2d ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023), 53-57, quoting from p. 57.

End

Theologian that he is, Paul shifts his concentration, from believers’ having access to these powers to the exalted status of Jesus Christ at the right hand of God (1:20-22; cf. Mark 10:35-45). His description is effusive: “above all celestial leadership and authority and power and lordship and [above] every name being named not only in this Era but in the coming Era.” This language labels Jesus as the Emperor over all emperors, the King over all kings, and the Lord over all lords. When God’s energy raised and exalted Jesus to these supernal heights, God, not in some far off future, but simultaneously “placed all things under his feet” (Ephesians 1:22). Right now, whether this world looks like it or not, Paul claims, Jesus rules over all. As the Lord of lords, the Father gave the Son the gift to be “head over everything for the church” (1:22-23). This, too, is a remarkable claim: God gave Christ (1) to be the head over everything and (2) this gift of Christ was to or for the church.  As such, Christ is the head of the whole church, not just one group or one race or one gender in the church that happens to think it is the one true and faithful embodiment of the church, which far too many have claimed.

Paul has run out of subordinates, so he sums it all up with “the fullness of the one filling all things in all ways” (1:23; Second Testament). These words are about the the pervasive presence of Christ in the world through his presence in the church (see 1:10). The center of all creation for the Lord of lords and King of kings is the church, but the church is the body of Christ, which means the fullness turns all our attention to Christ (cf. Colossians 1:15-20).